Big Bang Machine experiment successful: CERN - - India News Times

Scientists at Geneva's European Centre for Nuclear Research or CERN marked a breakthrough in their efforts to understand the origins of the universe on Tuesday, as they successfully conducted the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment, which has been dubbed the 'Big Bang Machine'. According to reports, scientists working on the 'Big Bang machine' celebrated high-velocity collisions between sub-atomic particles at the LHC on the frontiers of Switzerland and France. Reports said that two proton beams circulating in alternate directions collided and reached the maximum planned energy levels of seven trillion electron volts within a few minutes. It is believed that the achievement marks the beginning of work that could lead to the discovery of fundamental new physics. "We are very excited, no longer nervous and very happy... It's the beginning of a long fantastic era of particle physics," The Financial Times quoted Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the Director General of CERN, as saying. Two beams of protons began 10 days ago to speed at high energy in opposite directions around the 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel under the Swiss-French border at Geneva. The CERN was trying to use the powerful superconducting magnets to force the two beams to cross, creating collisions and showers of particles. They could have been successful immediately, but such huge machines were so tricky to run that it took days. When collisions become routine, the beams were packed with hundreds of billions of protons, but the particles were so tiny that few collided at each crossing. The Large Hadron Collider was launched with great fanfare on September 10, 2008, but it was sidetracked nine days later when a badly soldered electrical splice overheated, causing extensive damage to the massive magnets and other parts of the collider some 300 feet (100 meters) below the ground. It cost 40 million dollars to repair and improve the machine so that it could be used again at the end of November. Since then, the collider has performed almost flawlessly, giving scientists valuable data in the four-week run before Christmas.